Helping Others To Sell Online

When starting up a small business, there are many channels that need to be secured; sales, marketing and distribution are just a few. Ultimately, getting eyeballs on your product is the most direct channel towards making a sale (conversion). When gaining market share, new business owners sometimes use platforms such as eBay and Etsy to market their products and begin generating customers and sales.

Meet Product Vendors for WooCommerce

Product Vendors enables your WooCommerce store to specify vendors for products in your store. Each vendor can have a specific commission percentage added, enabling you to pay your vendors for their efforts in creating their awesome products.

Gathering products- an alternative approach

You love WordPress, WooThemes and WooCommerce. You’re itching to set up an online store and get in on all the action, yet you don’t have a product or service to sell.

Let Product Vendors help to get your store off the ground.

Choose a product you’re passionate about. Lets use stylised candles as an example. You’d venture down to your local craft market or store, source a few vendors and pitch your idea; “lets get your candles online”.

Vendor management screen

A quick setup of WordPress, your favourite WooThemes theme, WooCommerce and Product Vendors and you’re ready to go. You’ve now both started a new business, as well as helping others to move their businesses into the digital age.

Collaborative sales

You and your good friends are all creative artists. You want to create a platform to sell your artworks online. Product Vendors enables you all to sell your artworks on a single store, each taking commission from the sales of your own artworks, with the remaining sale revenue being funnelled back into your new online business.

Vendor shop page

Buy Product Vendors Today

As you can see, the possible use cases for the Product Vendors extension for WooCommerce are virtually limitless, limited only by your imagination. Buy Product Vendors today, experiment with this new tool in your tool belt and get your ideas online, today.

Discount Coupon

Get this awesome plugin for 20% off when you use the coupon code PVLAUNCH at checkout, until August 21st, 2013.

May I ask if this works with the Subscriptions plugin? is there a dashboard in the account area that vendors can see what is owed to them? Is this a similar extension such as Commission king? I feel the power of this is immense so well done but I would like to hear more about it to be honest.

Product Vendors uses normal WooCommerce products, so it will work seamlessly with Subscriptions just like any product already does.

For reporting, you can add a shortcode to your site that will show vendors how much they have earned each month – you can find out about all that (and more) in the extension docs here: http://docs.woocommerce.com/document/product-vendors/. That report appears on the front-end for vendors, but they do have access to the WordPress dashboard so they can manage their products.

The interface for Product Vendors is different to Commission King, but you will still be able to assign multiple vendors to a single product so that they each earn commission from the sale. This effectively reproduces the same functionality that Commission King offers.

Thanks Hugh, il do my extra reading in he extensions area. This seems a powerful extension if vendors can upload products and not see or change other products so that is really great. Thanks for the extra feedback here. Hopefully this extension sees some extra ideas in woo ideas and stays on a strong development path as I can see it being very powerful. Cheers

This “effectively reproduces the same functionality that Commission King offers”…

If that is the case it would be awesome of Woo if they upgraded purchasers of Commission King (via Woo) to this new extension. Similar to how you did for Notifications Pro -> Advanced Notifications; especially since Commission King itself got retired awhile back with no notification.

@Hugh, one more question for you in relation to Sensei. Do you guys feel this could work into Sensei in the future? What I mean here is the problem right now with Sensei is that “teachers” cannot go in and mark their own courses and change their course quizes for example without seeing other people courses also? Obviously this is specific to WooCommerce here but I feel this type of plugin is key to Sensei also as well as its WooCommerce ability. For example I have 5 teachers on my site – and 5 courses that change alot. I would like to use this to pay each teacher their right commission but also I would like them to access only their own course. I think you get what I mean here but I thought I would bring this up because I would like to see something like this in Sensei also. Hopefully this is helpful – its already asked for in the woo ideas but the ability to pay out commissions also is key of course.

Teachers only being able to view/modify their own courses is something that is on the cards. It would be separate functionality to this extension (ie: most likely built into Sensei core) yet would compliment this extension nicely. 🙂

Matt’s extension has similar functionality, but it handles things completely differently. I can’t comment on specific functionality as I have not used his extension, but I can say that Product Vendors is certainly not a copy of it. The code for our extension is completely original and we didn’t take anything from Matt’s one.

One thing that I can guarantee is different is that our extension (like with all of our products) comes with our world-class hands-on support that no one will be able to replicate 🙂

Not to split hairs but there are plenty of other companies around that offer excellent customer support and with the crap you guys have pulled over the last year you most certainly are not the shining example you would like to be..

Your comment here implies that Matt doesn’t provide quality support… also, I found his plugin quite some time ago so he obviously beat you to the punch here and to me it appears that his plugin has more features (like paypal adaptive payments) than yours does… but you have no comment on that??

Matt’s plugin handles paying Vendors at each sale via PayPal’s split payments functionality. It’s built in so that each vendor gets paid their appropriate share, immediately and at checkout. I don’t see any mention of that with this plugin. Is it there and I just don’t see it? Or do you have to pay each vendor their share manually?

I think this plugin needs to be explained fully on what it does and possibly a table showing the differences this plugin has or doesn’t have against Matt Gates version. I also know that Matt’s plugin has been around for some time but I haven’t had the chance to sample it yet. There will always be competition when releasing a product. I personally would like to know if you provide support for 3rd party developers to add features of their own to this plugin.

If you would like a vendor to receive commissions, but you don’t want them to manage their products themselves then you can do that – you just don’t add any users as admins of that vendor. That way commissions are generated like normal, but only normal site admins can edit the products (just like is standard in WooCommerce).

It’s unlikely that we’ll be building a front-end for product management – there’s just too many variables involved.

With regards to vendors having WP dashboard access though, it won’t be an issue – they’re restricted from accessing any pages other than their own products and their profile. We’ve made sure the security on that is as tight as possible.

Then, how about the vendor payments and vendor to customer support? Do the vendor only able to use paypal? Do the vendor able to use their own shipping method?

I think we should make the vendor profile page more useful so customer can contact vendor directly. For Example, we can make a form there for them to contact the vendor or make the product enquiry work nicely with this plugin.

This looks like a potentially interesting and powerful extension. Is the presumption that all products will be physically stocked and shipped by the website owner/operator or will vendors be able to fulfil orders placed through the website direct to customers?

That’s what I was interested in. “will vendors be able to fulfil orders placed through the website direct to customers?” How is stock managed if you don’t give the vendor admin access? Does the site owner and the vendor get a New Customer Order after a sale is made?

You can handle order fulfillments any way you like – if you give them access, vendors have complete control over all of their product data, which includes stock quantities. If you want the vendors to fulfil the orders then you must work that out with them – this extension gives you the power to choose 🙂

Then, how about the vendor payments and vendor to customer support? Do the vendor only able to use paypal? Do the vendor able to use their own shipping method?

I think we should make the vendor profile page more useful so customer can contact vendor directly. For Example, we can make a form there for them to contact the vendor or make the product enquiry work nicely with this plugin.

I think the shipping methods are the key here for physical stock. Basically how does a vendor choose there shipping supplier and price points? Can they do this independently of other products if they have access to the table rate shipping plugin?

How about the shipping method and parallel payment problem? We can’t use the extension if seller can’t set there own shipping method. If the store owner collect the money first and pay the vendor later will also cost at least 4-6% of transaction fee which is not reasonable.

With respect to using this extension with WC Subscriptions, there is a small problem. If you’re using subscriptions and groups for woocommerce, you need to create pages, right? These pages are then assigned to groups.

Will product vendors allow each vendor create subscription products as well as create pages?

Please let me know how this totally works with Subscriptions + Groups + Groups for woocommerce

Yes, yes, yes! This is the extension I’ve been waiting for!!! I’m hooked up and completely excited with possibilities.

One thing that is important to mention, in my opinion, is the fact that if you use WooThemes products you can be completely sure they are no interoperability issues. So if you get for example WooCommerce + Sensei + This extension + WooThemes’ theme, then everything should play nicely together out of the box. That’s an added value of getting all the plugins from one developer.

Finally you guys have featured this awesome plugin! I discovered and purchased it from the main developer at the start of this year. It’s been a massive time saver and the customer service is kick ass amazing.

Just to clarify once again – this is a completely different extension to Matt Gates’ Product Vendor extension. There are obviously a lot of similarities between the two, but this one is built entirely by WooThemes.

Great direction but it does not give a full solution, what about shipping the product? This phase is not in the scoop, a customer as made an order, now what? Who will send them The shipping confirmation and tracking info? The vendor should be able to manage his orders,

Great work Woo! Amazing! I’m wondering about the shipping / fulfillment too. In Matt Gate’s product vendor plugin, one of the biggest problems is that once the vendor ships the item, I (the admin) have no good way of knowing that it has been shipped other than emailing them and asking. If they were linked into the ability to mark an order as complete (which would auto generate an email to the customer and the administrator), that would be ideal. Does this plug-in do anything like that?? Also, I would love a way to contact the vendor directly about products.

I bought mine yesterday with no problem. You might want to submit a support ticket. Woo is very helpful. I bought an extension one time and got an email for 20% discount an hour later and they credited my account!

Has anyone got any answers to the questions above, it seams we have lost our question and answer session?

Have you submitted a support ticket? Woo will hook you up. I bought an extension one time and an hour later got a 20% off coupon in my email. I submitted a ticket and they refunded me the 20% the next day!

Vendors do not have access to these reports. However, you can make sales stats available to your vendors by using the following shortcodes:

[product_vendors_total_earnings]
[product_vendors_month_earnings]

My question is “How do I make these stats available to my vendors?” Am I supposed to create a page for each vendor that includes these shortcodes? Is there somewhere in the Vendor Dashboard that when they login they could see these stats?
To me there should be a Reports tab in the Vendors Dashboard with these stats.

Those shortcodes work like any other WordPress shortcode – simply add them to any page on your site and the reports will show on that page for each vendor. If non-vendors go to the page then they will see nothing.

You could build it into the ratings system since their products will be using the same star ratings system (I assume). Make it so you can rate vendors and show the star ratings and total ratings underneath their title for the profile:

To reply to the various comments about the differences between this extension and Matt Gates’ one: These are two completely different extensions – Product Vendors is all our own work and we did not copy any code or functionality from Matt. Our plugin will have some features that his does not have and his will have some that our’s does not have – many of which are on the roadmap for future versions of Product Vendors.

Thanks for the comments and feature suggestions on here – we will definitely be taking some of them into consideration and will work on making the next version of this extension even more feature-packed. 🙂

I have got a question I hope can be answered here and il try to give a very simple example. The example I am going to use is for physical shipped products from the vendors warehouse and not of course from a central location like Amazon would because I assume not many Amazon like stores are about the place with those kind of resources so I am sure my example below is pretty typical!! 😉

I have my WooCommerce store with this plugin running. I have 3 vendors who are selling 3 products through my store and use this plugin. My Store is in UK, Vendor A is giving me products from UK and using my site to sell them. The item will be shipped from Vendor A Warehouse – does he set his shipping prices and products details using this plugin?

Vendor B is in France and will ship from France – does he set his shipping rates from France?

Vendor C is from South Africa and will ship from South Africa – does he set his own shipping rates?

Custom A (from UK) comes along and buys all three products – are 3 emails just with the appropriate items in them sent to each Vendor so they can fulfil the order?

Does Custom A pay a pretty heavy shipping cost as a result of the 3 shipping prices accumulating coming from different places? (The answer is probably yes which is fine of course as this is just the way it is!!) but my point here is does the custom know this and is notified like on amazon that it will be shipped from different places and this is the reason for the costs?

Does the plugin handle returns easily? As in if Custom A does not like the product from Vendor B in France – is there some place the user can easily see that he/she should return it to the Vendor where it came from? Or is this outside the scope of the plugin.

When it comes to shipping I think all these questions are valid as this is quite a complex plugin in reality and needs extensive functionality for it not to be a nightmare to run and manage which physical products. For virtual products its absolutely great of course as the commission is the key piece of functionality. Hopefully there can be more extensive examples of how this plugin can work in this 3 Vendor shipping scenario for physical products. Maybe someone can shed some light on this. Cheers for your time

Let me answer your question. I have start discuss with them about this extension one day before they launch it in a support ticket.

The situation now is the extension is only first release version and only have the function to list product using different vendor account, and calculate commission for each of the vendor.

Both payment and shipping method are still cant be divided which mean only one payment reciever and one shipping method can be used. Sorry, It is really not reality but according to them in order to make it work that involve a lot of technical issue ( need to change the woocommerce framework).

@daileycon I have pretty much asked your questions in my initial post so hopefully woo can clarify on this. I would assume there is three notifications sent out to each vendor if their products are part of an order but not sure until woo clarify! also I would assume the commissions are divided at a product level and not at an order level so you should be fine on this one.

@aky007 I assume this right now until a version 2.0 of this plugin it is mostly suited to virtual products as it seems ideal for this task.

Good question but according to their staff it is currently not possible to get every vendor to use their own payment method. The method for now is Customer PAY to the store owner and the owner PAY the vendor. Actually this mean the store owner will become the middle man like paypal to collect the money and send them to the final vendor. From my imagination, you can do it in 3 way.

Paypal parallel is a good function to solve this problem without doing huge modification but vendor will force to use paypal as the own payment method and there are limit to 10 payment item in one time checkout. However, the current version of extension still no include this option.

For now, Shipping method can only use store owner shipping method. From my imagination, there is 4 cases.
1. It is a local online store and all user use most popular shipping method like in US for USPS and Australia for AusPost. Both woocommerce have extension calculator.
2. All vendor agree a flat shipping rate like $10 for each shipment
3. Store owner is a big company with great connection with one of the shipping company like DHL which give special price for all vendor. So they all use DHL.
4. Store owner is doing drop ship. So he/she can use he/she personalize shipping method.

There are still got some demanding feature beside the separate billing and shipping such as vendor can personalize their own shop page or adding their logo/media kit on their profile, Vendor Feedback with Feedback profile, VENDOR ORDER ADMIN PAGE (don’t know why Wootheme can miss this), auction feature( like ebay), vendor frontend management (too many variable so not reality), vendor support page (pretty cool function if can make it.).

I have summarize all comment and suggestion. Hope wootheme work some of them out as soon as possible!

Just so I follow. If I have 3 vendors and they each have a paypal account setup with their vendor account. When someone buys something with one order from each vendor it can’t split the payment into the separate paypal accounts?
That’s crazy if this extension doesn’t have the functionality. It must be able to split the orders and send separate payments or its useless. Why even have a paypal setup for the vendor? Are you supposed to tell your customers to only order from one vendor at a time? haha

Hi guys – there’s quite a few questions here about payments, shipping and order fulfilment, so let me clarify a few things:

1) Vendors can edit ALL aspects of a product – they have complete control over everything about the product (except the commission percentage that they’ll receive obviously). This means that they’ll be able to select the shipping class of the product. However, they will not be able to add new shipping classes – only the site admins can do that at this stage.

2) You can choose to fulfil orders in any way you like – vendors can ship the products or the store owner can ship the products. That being said, vendors do not have access to the order info in the WordPress dashboard, so they cannot see where to ship the orders and they cannot change the order status. Also, vendors are not currently notified when one of their products is ordered – that is on the roadmap for a future version of the plugin.

3) Commissions are generated per product, so one order can contain orders from 10 different vendors and the commissions will all be worked out correctly.

4) At the moment, Product Vendors does not process commission payments automatically. All orders are paid for by the customer in the same way that your site currently handles those payments, so you don’t need to worry about that. You can pay your commissions in any manual way you choose, but the extension allows you to export all of your currently unpaid commissions to a CSV file that you can import into PayPal’s Mass Payments tool. This is currently the easiest way to handle your payments with this extension, but we do plan on supporting more direct payment methods in the future.

5) allmyhoney is correct – Product Vendors is currently mostly suited to virtual products. In future version we plan on supporting physical products much more smoothly, so keep an eye out for that.

@Hugh, thank you for the explainattion and descriptions here – very helpful as the initial blog post and documentation did not really cover physical product scenarios comprehensively so it’s obviously hard to just jump in and test it out and purchase. I look forward to the next release as this plugin really needs to be very comprehensive to be honest and is ambitious. Notifications are simply a must and this would require a large emailing piece of functionality also so this plugin potentially needs a version 2 and even 3 but it seems to be off to a good start.

I am building a multi vendor site but I only want to host for other vendors and don’t want to collect the payment for each sale. How do I make the payment Gateway available to the third party vendors? I would then manually invoice each vendor for my percentage of the sale value. Is this not how EBay works?

The reason on why we need the vendor PayPal address is to pay him/her the commission. In this extension you can set the commission to pay immediately in a auto mode which mean when you reciece the payment from the buyer then you can set to be automatic pay the vendor immediately.

Worth noting. I got an email from Woocommerce promoting the plugin which states that it: “includes the functionality previously found in the Commission King extension”

I still see a huge advantage for commission king and that is that a commission can be assigned to any recipient or user. Because not everybody has a vendor role within a site. Maybe nice to increase developments in that direction. (I use both plugins now)

Next to that commission king has multiple payment possibilities, but I understand that there are some developments for that already.

Good luck with developments, I’m curious what you guys will come up with!

Product Vendors doesn’t use user roles at all, so you don’t need to worry about that kind of thing. When you create a vendor you can optionally assign a user to it – the only reason you would assign a user (or multiple users) to a vendor is if you want them to manage their own products and see their sales reports. You can assign multiple vendors to the same product and set a different commission percentage per vendor – this pretty much reproduces the functionality of Commission King, but in a very different way. 🙂

Thanks for your reply. I’m talking in terms of photographers and content-writers but I guess the vendor title has to do. It’s a different way, but I understand what you say. It’s the most practical way and I can explain the difference in roles in the description of the vendor page.

Is it possible to make a searchbox inside the product vendors list instead of scrolling down a list of checkboxes on the add product page? That would be great!

Is it possible to have variable percentages of commission in the future? I’m working with vendors and creatives. A larger percentage of the amount needs to go to the vendor. Now i can only commit only one percentage per vendor.

With regard to the numerous comments about shipping/handling could the Per Product Shipping extension be deployed alongside Product Vendors to facilitate vendors customising their own shipping solution

Yip – that should work out perfectly. Vendors can edit all data about a product, so if you have the Per Product Shipping extension installed then vendors will be able to manage the shipping classes right on the product page. 🙂

After reading the comments, I see huge potential in this plugin and I foresee it becoming one of the flagship plugins for Woo (like Sensei). With the right functionality included, the are possibilities for building market places, auction sites, etc opening up! Good job and thanks for this very promising plugin!

How can the user choose the vendor email from the seller in the plugin Product Enquiry. It is posible?
like a select o multiple choise? i dont want to send the email to every vendors, only the user select in the form.

Is it possible for the vendors to make a vendor account straight from the website, so they don’t have to contact u personally.
So something like this : create shop > then they enter there shop details > u get to review this and except > they can start selling